What natural results actually means

Natural is the most overworked word in this industry. It appears on every website in the field, including, I notice, mine. It has been made to carry so many different meanings that it has nearly stopped carrying any, so when I use it in a consultation I try to say what I actually mean by it rather than letting the word do the work.

What I do not mean is subtle for its own sake. Subtle is a quantity, and quantity is the easy part of this. Natural is a method.

Proportion before product

The first thing I look at in a consultation is usually not the line somebody came in about. It is how the face sits together. A face is a set of relationships, and each part is read against the others. If I look only where you are pointing, I am working on one detail inside a picture I have not bothered to look at. That is how faces end up with an area that has been attended to very carefully and a face around it that no longer quite agrees with it.

So I look at the whole thing first, in daylight, at conversational distance, and I say out loud what I am seeing. Sometimes the conclusion is that the area you asked about is not the area doing the work.

Doing less, then looking again

I would rather under-treat somebody and see them again in two weeks than over-treat somebody and spend three months waiting. That is not modesty. It is arithmetic. Doing too little is correctable in an afternoon. The other direction asks for a kind of patience nobody enjoys, and it asks for it from the person who has to live inside the face.

So I will often plan for two appointments where one might do, and I will say at the outset that the second one is part of the plan rather than a sign the first one failed. People sometimes read that as a lack of confidence. I understand why. It is the opposite.

Respecting how a face moves

A face at rest is a photograph. A face in conversation is what people around you actually see. So in a consultation I will ask you to talk to me, to raise your eyebrows, to squint, to look annoyed with me, which some people find easier than others. Movement tells me where a face carries its expression and what it would cost to quiet a particular area down.

Anything that reads as done tends to read that way in motion first, before it reads that way in a still photograph. That is why I am unwilling to plan from a photograph, and why I will not plan from one somebody has brought in of a different face entirely.

The whole face, and the years around it

The other half of proportion is time. A face keeps changing after you leave, and a plan made for one afternoon tends to age less gracefully than a plan made for a few years. I would rather write a sequence down, work through it in order, and reassess between steps than do everything available on the first day because it was all on the menu.

A written sequence also lets you stop. If you get two steps in and decide the third is not necessary, that is not a plan that failed. That is the plan working. Some of the people I have looked after longest are the ones who did one thing, were content with it, and have not asked for anything since.

Working this way makes for a slower first appointment and a longer relationship, and it means I say the word later more often than the industry generally likes. Later is not a refusal. It is usually just an honest answer about sequence: this thing first, then we look, then we decide about the next thing with more information than we have today. I would rather give somebody a plan they can follow for five years than a busy afternoon they have to live with.

What the phrase is not

I want to be careful here, because natural is a word that can be made to sound like a promise, and it is not one. It describes how I approach the work: restraint, proportion, sequence, and reassessment. It does not describe what any particular face will do, which depends on your anatomy, your history, and a fair amount that neither of us can see in advance. Anybody who uses the word as a commitment about your outcome is selling you something.

What I can tell you is how I plan, what I would rather not do, and when I would rather wait. If you want to hear that applied to your own face, that is a conversation rather than an article, and it takes about forty-five minutes.